Comment by jmcgough | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmcgough | Hacker News Reader

I worked in a Neuroscience lab as an undergrad research assistant for several years. My first year in particular involved a lot of cell counting and rat care.

There was a large room for housing rats for all of the labs in the building - mostly Sprague Dawley, which are very well studied at this point and chosen because they're easy to care for. The room was nowhere near 20 - 26C. It felt like walking into a fridge.

I think there are more problems than just the temperature that rats are kept at.

There are requirements for minimum standards of housing for animals - every university that does animal experimentation is required to have a LAR (lab animal resources) officer who verifies compliance. But researchers have to be frugal with money (even grad students are expected to live on a 20-30k research stipend), so they really do the bare minimum. Cages are as small as they can be, and rats are housed in pairs so that they can socialize, but their cages are almost barren. They're required to have some form of environmental enrichment, which means a little wooden rod in every cage that they can play with and chew.

It's frustrating to think that there are probably many studies that have been impacted by not studying "normal" rats. We're studying specific research breeds of stressed rats who're trapped in little boxes for their whole lives. It'd be like if you studied humans who've been trapped in their apartments for the last 4 months and assumed normal psychology and physiology.

> They're required to have some form of environmental enrichment, which means a little wooden rod in every cage that they can play with and chew.

The description you've provided--especially that line--is eerily reminiscent of the "Enrichment Center" from Portal.[0] As that game (humorously) demonstrates, it's unreasonable to expect that the physiology of an animal wouldn't change under those conditions. How much research would've resulted in different outcomes had the animals involved been kept under different conditions?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_(video_game)

What a perfect analogy, though that's no doubt intentional in the game's design. Don't forget the "companion cube" that the game not-so-subtly implies the player ought to develop a relationship with haha

That was a really great piece of game design that grew out of a problem picked up in playtesting where some players didn't realize they were meant to keep the cube with them to solve multiple puzzles; they'd leave it behind and then get frustrated on the next puzzle.

So they added a heart to the texture and a few voice lines, and not only was that problem solved but they created one of the most memorable moments in the game by making people care about a cube and then having them get rid of it.

"While it has been a faithful companion, your Companion Cube cannot accompany you through the rest of the test. If it could talk - and the Enrichment Center takes this opportunity to remind you that it cannot - it would tell you to go on without it because it would rather die in a fire than become a burden to you."

Just to add on to this, a proper cage sized for 2 rats is probably going to take up at least a small kitchen table's worth of space. When have you ever seen a cage that size in a research lab? Besides, groups of 2 are the barest minimum you want for keeping rats.

As to the whole "studying stressed out rodents might not give representative results" point, I'm reminded of the Rat Park experiment [0].

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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

Yeah, Bret Weinstein mentioned something similar regarding lab mice in a Joe Rogan podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve4q-1D_Ajo

The podcast he did with his brother Eric (The Portal #19) gives a very good history of the work he did as a grad student in finding that the telomeres of the lab mice supplied to US labs were elongated due the selective breeding process of producing as many mice as possible.

The implications are quite alarming for existing testing and they talk about how he was basically ignored and the mice quietly fixed.

> Bret Weinstein mentioned something similar

Weinstein talks about how they are different and why it matters and how significant it is.

Articles like this just talk about how it changes results. Mice aren't people. Cold mice are not hot mice. Stressed mice are not chilled mice. We need to be aware of this and this is a good article and it talks on how to action it, but Weinstein is making a case (right or wrong) for something different and more significant.

I've read many research papers, and the emotionless way they describe doing things like breaking legs, breaking backs and inducing various medical conditions, always bothers me.

I can't see any good alternatives, and I know this is important to advance human medicine, but I can't help but feel it.

Oh, and we never killed mice - we "sacrificed" them (in the lab we said "sacked" for short).

Yeah, it never sat particularly well with me. We and other labs studied neurodegenerative diseases, so we studied a model form of those diseases by inducing it in rats. The Parkinson's lab adjacent to us gave their rats a drug that destroyed their dopaminergic neurons, we inhibited thiamine to cause severe memory impairment. Really horrible things, but I'm not sure that there's a good alternative if we want to study diseases so we can prevent or cure them in humans.

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